In keeping with his usual breakfast of Fox News and Twitter outbursts, President Trump doubled down on his support of Confederate monuments this morning. Statues in cities like Baltimore and Durham, North Carolina, have been taken down this week after the fatal violence in Charlottesville, sparked by debate over its Robert E. Lee statue. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” he tweeted shortly after 9 a.m. “You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson—who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!” He added that “the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”

This isn’t just another crazy Trump tweet. In light of the violence in Charlottesville, it may well be another win for white supremacists: Like the president, they believe monuments erected to glorify Confederate generals who fought for the right of white people to own black slaves are “beautiful” reminders of the past, so much so that they descended on Charlottesville to fight for the city’s Lee statue. That the president—who first expressed his support of Confederate monuments in his controversial press conference on Tuesday—felt compelled to repeat his stance and potentially embolden further violence is staggering. Richard Spencer has already vowed to return to Charlottesville; does the president really want to give him a nudge?

Trump’s defense feels especially misplaced given that at least one of those Confederate leaders whose legacy the president is so passionate to protect completely disagrees with him; Robert E. Lee never wanted such monuments built. “I think it wiser,” Lee wrote about a proposed Gettysburg memorial in 1869, “…not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.” And in a newly published open letter at Slate, the descendants of Stonewall Jackson ask Richmond mayor Levar Stoney and the city’s Monument Avenue Commission to remove Jackson’s statue and all other Confederate statues from its Monument Avenue thoroughfare, calling them “overt symbols of racism and white supremacy.”

“Charlottesville showed us unequivocally that Confederate statues offer pre-existing iconography for racists,” wrote Jackson's great-grandsons, William Jackson Christian and Warren Edmund Christian. “To them, the Robert E. Lee statue is a clear symbol of their hateful ideology. The Confederate statues on Monument Avenue are, too—especially Jackson, who faces north, supposedly as if to continue the fight.”

Jackson’s descendants say that while they’ve learned that Jackson was loving to his family and had taught Sunday school to slaves in Lexington, Virginia, they ultimately “cannot ignore his decision to own slaves, his decision to go to war for the Confederacy, and, ultimately, the fact that he was a white man fighting on the side of white supremacy,” they wrote. “While we are not ashamed of our great great grandfather, we are ashamed to benefit from white supremacy while our black family and friends suffer. We are ashamed of the monument.” Note to President Trump: Before you continue invoking Jackson, you may want to sit down with these guys.

Meanwhile in Charlottesville last night, new lights shone on the University of Virginia campus as thousands of people gathered for a candlelight “Take Back the Lawn” vigil in the same spot where, on Friday night, torch-wielding white supremacists and neo-Nazis had marched, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” This time the crowd sang “Lean on Me” and “We Shall Overcome.”